An 11-pound, artificially intelligent orb is launching
to the International Space Station.

The robot, called the Crew Interactive Mobile Companion
(CIMON), will have an animated face, talk, and fly
around.

CIMON will useIBM Watson software to
interact with astronauts.

When German astronaut and scientist Alexander Gerst rockets to
the International Space Station in June, he'll bring along an
unusual friend: a flying, talking, intelligent robot.

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Called the Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, or CIMON, the
orb-shaped device weighs about 11 pounds and displays an
expressive digital face. Its "brain" is powered in part by IBM
Watson - the
artificial intelligence software that defeated Jeopardy!
champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011 and won $1
million. Aircraft manufacturer Airbus helped develop the robot as
well.

"In short, CIMON will be the first [artificial
intelligence]-based mission and flight assistance system,"
Manfred Jaumann, a payload engineer at Airbus, said in a press release. He added that
CIMON will be a "a free flyer, a kind of flying brain" that will
interact with, aid, and learn from astronauts.

Training a floating head to be a friend

The robot was created primarily by the German Aerospace Center
(DLR), which worked in collaboration with IBM, the European Space
Agency, and other partners.

CIMON's team trained the robot on Earth to recognize Gerst's
voice via microphones and his face using cameras. The machine
follows him around using an air-propulsion system.

The robot will have a stand-alone version of Watson AI in its
memory banks. That means no internet connection - a
tricky problem in space - will be required for CIMON to
interpret data, respond to commands, solve problems, and
generally be a useful little robot.

"It can also serve as an early warning system for technical
problems," Airbus said.

Gerst will unbox CIMON in June and use the flying robot through
October. During that time, it will help Gerst solve basic
problems and check off tasks like a digital assistant. But
CIMON's prime mission is to complete three goals: experiment with
crystal growth in space, solve a Rubik's cube, and "perform a
complex medical experiment using CIMON as an 'intelligent' flying
camera," according to Airbus.

"Experiments sometimes consist of more than 100 different steps,
CIMON knows them all," Matthias Biniok, the lead Watson architect
in Germany, said in an IBM blog post.

caption

IBM, Airbus, and DLR are working together to fly an artificially intelligent device called the Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, or CIMON, to the International Space Station.

CIMON
will use a neural network to interact with and learn from Gerst,
at least at first.

Ultimately, CIMON will spy on space station astronauts to help
assess their emotional states and psychological "group effects,"
Biniok said - a feature that could help better engineer months-
or years-long journeys to the moon or Mars.

"Social interaction between people and machines, between
astronauts and assistance systems equipped with emotional
intelligence, could play an important role in the success of
long-term missions," Airbus said.

"We predict that assistance systems of this kind also have a
bright future right here on earth, such
as in hospitals or to support nursing care," Biniok said.

In case you were wondering how close we're getting to "2001: A Space Odyssey," there
are no astronauts named "Dave"
scheduled to fly to the space station anytime soon, according
to NASA.